Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence

PEACEFUL FAMILIES

Peaceful Families

AMERICAN MUSLIM EFFORTS

AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

JULIANE HAMMER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

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6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

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All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number 2018964758

ISBN 978-0-691-19087-7

eISBN 978-0-691-19438-7 (ebook.)

Version 1.1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel and Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Jill Harris

Jacket Design: Layla Mac Rory

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Nathalie Levine and Kathryn Stevens

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

1    Shifting Landscapes and a Missing Map: Studying Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence  1

Mapping the Project  2

Domestic Violence as a Field of Study  6

Ethics, Justice, and Patriarchy  10

The Bigger Picture: Gender, Authority, Religion, and Culture  17

The Structure of the Book  19

A Reflection on Activism and Critique  21

2    Murder, Honor, and Culture: Mediatized Debates on Muslims and Domestic Violence  25

The Murder of Aasiya Zubair  27

On Gendered Anti-Muslim Hostility  37

Mildred Muhammad: The Muslim DV Murder That Was Not  39

No Honor in Killing  44

Whither Culture?  50

3    Need to Know: Educating Muslim Communities about Domestic Violence  53

Sketching the Landscape of Muslim Advocacy  55

To Raise Awareness: Muslim Community Events  63

What Is Domestic Violence?  65

On Islam, DV, and Culture: Take I  69

On Islam, DV, and Culture: Take II  74

Leading the Conversation  77

From Awareness to Resources and Services  84

4    Need to Teach: Countering Oppression, Ending Injustice, and Preventing Harm  86

Seeing Abuse  89

Communities and Families of Silence  94

Working against Injustice and Oppression  98

DV, Islam, and Culture  105

An Islamic Family Model  108

Patriarchy, Feminism, and Hierarchy  112

Reflecting on Authority  114

5    To Lead and to Know: Religious Leaders and Scholars in the Work against Domestic Violence  116

On Community Leadership, Authority, and Power  119

Interviewing Imams  121

Analyzing the Interviews  126

Training the Leaders  136

Reflecting on Authority and Authenticity  148

6    To Support and Defend: Providing Services to Muslim Victims and Survivors  152

Navigating the Maze of DV Services  156

The Battered Women’s Movement: A History and Reflection  161

Providing (Muslim) Services  165

Interviews with Muslim Providers  179

7    Above and Beyond: Muslims in Interfaith and Mainstream DV Work (and the State)  188

The Interfaith Context  190

Muslims in the Mainstream DV Movement  203

Muslim DV Work and the State  220

8    Looking Back and the Road Ahead: Gender-Based Violence, Activism, and Critique  225

Looking Back  226

Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence: A Review  228

Scholarship, Activism, and Power  232

Questions and Answers  233

On Purpose, Ethics, and Justice  235

Appendix. Understanding Domestic Violence  239

Notes  243

Bibliography  267

Index  281

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN hard to research and harder to write. It would have been impossible without the enthusiasm and support of the many Muslim advocates and service providers who agreed to share their experiences and tell their stories, and who asked me probing and incisive questions in response to mine. I cannot name them but I hope they know that I am in awe of their courage and determination.

I have been blessed with a family that supports my work and makes my life beautiful. To my partner, Cemil, who is in competition with me over who writes the best acknowledgment: You have been there every step of the way; you have listened and read, commented and mirrored, admired and confirmed, and you have shared my outrage at the pain human beings inflict on each other every day. You are my rock in a world that scares me a little bit more every day—with you I will survive or go down fighting for what is just and beautiful. To Leyla, whose brilliant mind, sparkling wit, and generous love have fueled me in the darkest of times. And to Mehtap, whose heart is so big and whose courage to stand up for what is right seems endless, I think of you when I lose heart. Thank you, for another Go, Mama, Go poster for this book and for the one where every letter of my name is an amazing attribute: Joyful, Unstoppable, Loving, Intelligent, Amazing, Never Give Up, Excellent. My daughters are the reason for this work: I want the world to be a better place for them, a place that nurtures them to be their best selves and a place that is safer than it was for me. Recent political developments have both increased my worry for them and demonstrated what is possible when people unite for justice.

In the past few years I have lost several elders: my Papa, Bernhard Hammer, who instilled a love of books, languages, and learning in me; Onkel Hermi, Hermann Hammer, who shared stories and followed my academic career with pride; and ‘Ammu Jamil Shami, whose presence was always warm and full of heart and whose absence from the world is deeply felt. The loss of Fatima Mernissi and Saba Mahmood, two giants in feminist Muslim women studies, has reminded me that life is fragile and that every day matters.

I am grateful for the support and friendship of several women who make the world livable: Saadia Yacoob is always there when I need encouragement and reminds me of the beauty of God’s love. Kecia Ali has been on my side, luckily, since we first met, and I have admired her work and her courage for even longer. Aysha Hidayatullah allows me to doubt and to question and cares enough to check in on me when things are the worst. Homayra Ziad has been there for my tirades and with unfailing grace reminds me of what matters. Alison Kysia is the critical and supportive friend every scholar wishes for and this book would not have happened without her. Amal Eqeiq sends me her poetry on postcards from the world and za’tar to remind me of Palestine. Megan Goodwin is often the audience I write for in my head and unfailingly and critically encourages me to dig deeper and try harder in the face of obstacles. Shannon Schorey has convinced me, for now, that theory lives in all kinds of places and that I have it in me. You all are proof that community is what we make it.

I think of sisterhood and lifting each other up in sharing in the struggle in and beyond the academy: Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Donna Auston, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Rosemary Corbett, Sarah Eltantawi, Zareena Grewal, Shehnaz Haqqani, Sajida Jalalzai, Anne Joh, Sadaf Knight, Debra Majeed, Jerusha Rhodes, Shabana Mir, Fatima Seedat, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Laury Silvers, Riem Spielhaus, Najeeba Syeed, Farah Zeb, and many others.

I acknowledge my indebtedness to the work of Amina Wadud and Ziba Mir-Hosseini in this and my other academic and religious endeavors.

I am grateful for the friendship, occasional snark, and constant intellectual challenges that come from Michael Muhammad Knight—he has changed the way I think about our field and my place in it. Zaid Adhami reminds me that there are good men in the world and that honest debate can be at the core of ethical academic engagement. Carl Ernst, Omid Safi, Kambiz Ghanea Bassiri, Edward Curtis, Zaheer Ali, and Mohammad Khalil have provided encouragement along the way and I am grateful for their presence in the field.

I am blessed to have had students who have become colleagues and friends over the years: Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst, Kathy Foody, Shailey Patel, Atiya Husain, Katie Merriman, Micah Hughes, Samah Choudhury, Hina Muneeruddin, Alejandro Escalante, Barbara Sostaita, Becca Hendriksen, Israel Dominguez, and Samee Siddiqui. Micah was the only other person who voluntarily read the whole manuscript and provided helpful feedback even though I am his advisor. The decolonial solidarity crew is always on my mind in these difficult times: Imani Wadud, Caleb Moreno, Israel Durham, Amal Eqeiq, Saadia Yacoob, Zaid Adhami, and Jecca Namakkal.

It is customary to thank academic institutions for their support, and I acknowledge fellowship and leave support from George Mason University (GMU), the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, and the UNC Provost’s Office, as well as from the Institute for Policy and Understanding in Washington, D.C. It has been extraordinarily difficult to find funding for this project, and my efforts have taught me much about academic priorities, engaged scholarship, and the prevalence of discomfort in talking about domestic violence. The Institutional Review Boards at both GMU and UNC made things difficult but also reminded me of my ethical responsibility toward my interlocutors.

I am thankful to Fred Appel, my editor at Princeton University Press, for working with me for years on this project, for his patience, and for his meaningful and erudite feedback that made the final book better. The two anonymous reviewers of this book helped me see my project more clearly, and I thank them for their thoughtful and detailed and yet overwhelmingly positive comments.

To those who have been victims of domestic violence and to those who are fighting to end domestic abuse: I see you. This book is dedicated to those who continue the struggle and to those who had to rest for a while.

PEACEFUL FAMILIES

1

Shifting Landscapes and a Missing Map

STUDYING MUSLIM EFFORTS AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Violence is so ubiquitous and yet sometimes seems far away. Even after all this research I still have to remind myself that every second of my life, someone else’s life is defined, limited, and destroyed by people and systems that assume the right to break and cut, to wound and scar, to wield the power over life and death of other human beings.

HOW OFTEN HAVE I SEEN WORDS from a poem by Warsan Shire on social media that talks about the poet touching a map of the world and asking where it hurts? The map answers, on behalf of the world, that it hurts everywhere, and the poem touches me every time.¹ There is so much pain and suffering around us; the whole world is hurting. Much of this human pain and suffering is caused by violence inflicted on some humans by other humans. Even when we think it is elsewhere and not in our lives, this violence is all around us: as state-sanctioned violence, as war, as armed conflict, as sexual assault, as child abuse, as gender-based violence, as racist hate crimes, as incarceration, as gun violence, and the list goes on. The horrors of wounds, blood, and scars are physical but pain comes in many forms, injuries can be nonphysical, and trauma inflicted goes beyond the body.

Why, then, do I write a book about violence? And how do I write such a book? The why is easier to explain: I am writing to stop the violence. I want all of it to end. Now. The how required me to start in a specific place, to think about a specific aspect of the pervasive violence in our lives, and to find ways to go beyond it. My path to that goal has been to write this book about American Muslim efforts against domestic violence (DV). That there are people who, like me, want to end such violence gives me hope and it needs to be known.

Peaceful Families. House of Protection. Domestic Harmony. Healthy Families. House of Peace. These are concepts and indeed visions and goals to be found in the names of American Muslim organizations working against domestic violence in Muslim communities. Their central goal is simple: the eradication of domestic violence, a scourge that affects too many individuals, families, and communities in the United States and all over the world. Their work, however, is complicated, ongoing, and challenging. This book is about the people who carry out anti–domestic violence work in Muslim communities in the United States. It chronicles their efforts, their motivations, and their engagement with gender dynamics, textual interpretation, and religious authority.

It is also a book about domestic violence: about its victims and its perpetrators, about the structures, systems, and principles that allow domestic abuse to continue. It is the trauma and injury of the countless victims that makes the work of the advocates necessary and salient. I have ongoing concerns about erasing the victims and survivors from these pages by focusing on those who advocate for them and offer them support. However, the survivors and their stories are in every chapter and they are the reason this book came into being. I see and remember their pain and their suffering, and I deeply admire those who continue to work to end it. Thus this book on Muslim efforts against domestic violence is also a constant reminder of the existence of such violence in Muslim families and communities.

In what follows, I lay out the framework for the chapters of this book, including the sources and methods I employed in my study, the complex landscape of secondary literature on domestic violence, my arguments and theoretical contributions, the themes I trace throughout my research materials, and, finally, the structure of the book itself. I end with a short reflection on the politics of critique.

Mapping the Project

I was sitting in the back seat of her car when Karima, who was driving me back to the train station after an event at a Muslim community center, asked me how I had developed an academic interest in Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I have been asked the same question by other Muslim advocates many times and still struggle with a short answer. I have not been the victim or survivor of sustained abuse by an intimate partner, even though there have been occasions in my life that would count as abusive and damaging. I have only recently begun to piece together instances of abusive relationships that have surrounded me since childhood, but I never recognized or named them as such before I began this research. If it was not an experience of abuse or even the conscious witnessing of it, then what did inspire me to write this book?

It was 2008 and I was reading essays in Living Islam Out Loud for my book project on woman-led Friday prayer and Muslim women’s activism. One essay in the book stood out to me: Mohja Kahf writing about her jadedness in engaging in communal conversations about what Islam is, who has authority, and how this Islam matters to her. She tells the story of her volunteer work with a women’s shelter and a battered Muslim woman for whom she was asked to translate. The woman, severely physically and emotionally abused, was convinced that her abuse was in line with Islamic teachings and tried to find fault with her own actions to justify it. Kahf experienced outrage, but instead of further distancing herself from Islam and Muslims, she decided to engage:

We are implicated for dropping out of the community and its discourses when we are alienated. For giving up on changing Islam. Like I had. For giving up on being part of the conversation, the Islam-talk. . . . Why I need this Islam-talk? Because it was the only talk that would get this battered woman out of her old worldview. She would not leave without Islam. She has to take her Islam with her to make a new life, a new way of thinking about life as a woman, alone in the world. I had to give her a jolt of Islam-CPR, and I needed it myself, too.²

In her quest for better answers, she encountered the works of Muslim women scholars, like Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Asifa Qureishi, scholars who center their own exegetical and legal work on notions of gender justice, a topic I will return to. She also engaged with more conservative scholars and leaders and discovered that there was no support for domestic violence among them either. I will return to this shortly as well. In that moment in 2008, though, the idea for this research project and book was formed. First, I had to find out more about domestic violence in Muslim communities. Then I realized that my contribution, as a religious studies scholar, would be to analyze the religious frameworks and discourses surrounding domestic violence, and from there it was a logical step to focus on those who produced and applied such frameworks in their efforts to end domestic violence.

The sources for this book are of several different kinds: interviews and participant observation notes from six years of ethnographic research and a wide array of textual materials collected since 2008. As in most of my projects, I combine analysis of ethnographic materials (which become texts through the research process) with the analysis of sources that are more commonly associated with the category text, many of which are categorized as primary texts in the humanities. They include books, articles, blog posts, social media conversations, YouTube videos, song lyrics, poetry, and magazine features to account for the breadth of conversations about domestic violence taking place in Muslim communities. Some are produced by victims and survivors, others by concerned community members, and a significant portion comes from religious scholars and leaders. Some of these textual materials date back to the 1990s while others were produced and included in the project in the last few months of writing in 2017. I began the ethnographic portion of the study in 2010, and in the six years that followed I conducted almost seventy interviews with advocates, activists, and service providers. I also attended over forty events, including DV awareness events in Muslim communities, social service provider conferences, cultural sensitivity training sessions for law enforcement, service providers, and lawyers, and strategic meetings of Muslim DV advocates.

From the outset, it was clear to me that I was not going to create a comprehensive map of Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I do not privilege ethnographic research over textual analysis (or vice versa), nor do I see them in competition with each other. There is an emerging picture in my analysis, and there are patterns, but most important, there are stories to be told and stories to be analyzed. My greatest regret is that only a fraction of the stories, people, ideas, and materials I encountered have made it into the book.

There is a second reason for the missing map alluded to in the title of this chapter: the landscape of Muslim efforts against domestic violence is constantly changing. There are many reasons for the relative instability of this landscape, including the toll that the work takes on those engaged in the field, leading to burnout and high turnover rates; the oscillating and challenging shifts in funding (and the lack thereof); the political landscape of anti-Muslim hostility and anti-feminist backlash; and the very nature of nonprofit organizations and movements.

This means that the people I interviewed may or may not still be in this line of work or activism. The organizations I worked with may have ceased to exist, they may continue to be actively engaged in these efforts, or they may have moved on to merge with larger organizations or have incorporated DV-focused programs into other social service frameworks.

Despite this shifting landscape, the scene or movement against DV among Muslims is small, small enough for people to know each other. It was thus important and necessary to obscure the identities of those I interviewed—because there are risks associated with involvement in anti-DV work that range from stigmatization in communities to threats of violence from perpetrators of DV. I employ several strategies to help ensure confidentiality. Some, like using pseudonyms for people, are common in ethnographic research and writing. Others, such as creating composite stories in some of the chapters, will garner more skepticism but are justified by the need for protection. Where that is the case, I have indicated it in the chapter. I also decided to not disclose which organizations I worked with because it is rather easy to identify individuals associated with certain organizations. There were many more organizations than I could directly research during the project. Where possible in terms of confidentiality, I acknowledge ideas and materials produced by specific organizations to give credit to them for their intellectual work.

In my six years of active ethnographic research, I encountered many people whom I consider heroes, women and men, who invest their lifetime, their energy, and their courage in this work. I entered their networks and circles as a Muslim insider, albeit as one who is easily identified as a Muslim feminist. As a white Muslim woman, as a convert, and as a Muslim woman who does not wear hijab, I am a very particular insider who is also a potential outsider in certain circles. Work against domestic violence, in Muslim communities even more so than in the mainstream, carries risks, and the people in the movement have many good reasons to be skeptical and to require effort to earn their trust. I built that trust over time and came to be recognized as someone who is deeply invested in anti-DV effort beyond writing a book or publishing an article. The advocates I encountered first offered help in accessing networks; they provided the names of others I should connect with and they vouched for me when I did so. This method of identifying research partners in Muslim communities and DV organizations also provided me with some sense of the networks that existed at the time of my encounters.

There is perhaps a question that needs to be answered about what I mean by American Muslim efforts against domestic violence. I had to formulate an answer to that question in order to tell people what my research was about and so that they could help me identify research partners. I focused my study on those individuals, organizations, and networks for whom being Muslim and employing a Muslim framework against DV was meaningful. This means that this specific aspect of their identity was, in their own estimation, significant for their work against DV. My study is limited to the United States, and within the United States, I recognize as an American Muslim (or Muslim American) each individual who lives and works in the United States and identifies as Muslim.

Domestic Violence as a Field of Study

While DV is often ignored or made invisible in public discourse, occasionally interrupted by campaigns to raise awareness of it, there is a sizable academic literature on the topic. The vast majority of publications, including many books and academic journal articles, are produced in fields such as social work, criminology, public health, and psychology. It is beyond the purview of this study to offer a survey of this literature. As part of my own project, I read several dozen of those books and articles to gain an understanding of the approaches, debates, and historical developments in the field. A number of them have been included in the bibliography. These sources address incidents of domestic violence, statistical distribution, analysis of intervention methods, descriptions of physical and psychological trauma, the effects of witnessing DV, the methods of service providers, the impact on service providers, the economic impact of DV, the role of legislation and the policing of DV, and cultural factors that impact incidents of DV, as well as the role of substance abuse, other forms of violent crime, and the challenging arena of producing reliable data on DV. There is also a growing awareness in the DV field of the need for more research on the relationship between domestic violence and other forms of societal violence including war, gun violence (which plays a significant role in DV murders), and sexual violence.

There is a second type of literature, not always academic but relevant to this chapter. Beginning in the 1970s and increasing in volume ever since, there is a body of literature that raises awareness of DV through the voices and stories of the victims. Included here are publications that intersect with another strand of materials: works that engage religious traditions and communities in the conversation about domestic violence. In chapter 7, I discuss some of those materials, including the Journal of Religion and Abuse, in more detail.

At the intersection of religion and domestic violence, there is a much smaller but growing literature on Muslims and domestic violence. I consulted a significant number of sources on domestic violence in Muslim-majority societies as well as in Muslim-minority communities, in the United States, but also in Europe and Australia. Many of these sources are also listed in the bibliography. Some of them, especially those providing statistical evidence for the rate of domestic violence in American Muslim communities, play an important role in Muslim awareness efforts and will be discussed further in later chapters. One of the challenges for researchers working on Muslims and DV in Muslim communities is the very category Muslim. It intersects and is occasionally even conflated with other, ethnic categories, so that we see studies on Arab Americans, South Asian Americans, and others as overlapping with the religious category Muslim. This in turn makes it possible to consider Muslims as a cultural rather than religious group and leads to a tension over cultural difference that I explore further in chapter 2. At times, there also is a clear reluctance to consider religion as a meaningful category of inquiry, either as a resource or as a problem. Addressing religion’s relationship to DV is one important reason for writing this book.

Feminist Studies and Domestic Violence

There is an ongoing and at times raging debate about the relationship between feminist theory (and practice) on the one hand and addressing domestic violence in U.S. society on the other. Scholars have argued that it was the feminist movement that propelled domestic violence to the forefront of debates about families, women’s rights, and state legislation regarding marriage and family. This process began in the 1960s but is far more complicated than a straightforward story of mainstreaming feminist critiques of patriarchal hierarchies and resulting abuse of patriarchal power. The work to create acknowledgment of DV followed by legal, social, and political remedies for the staggering presence of domestic abuse in the lives of American families has seen success, repeated backlash, and a meandering path in which accomplishments have become bargaining chips for political games on the federal and state levels; funding has been increased and then dried up, and the level of domestic abuse has not significantly changed.

Nevertheless, the secondary literature on domestic violence and work to end it is permeated by a foundational feminist critique of power hierarchies and notions of gender-based violence as the result of patriarchal structures, not only in families but also in society at large. The movement to end domestic violence has to be seen as part of a broader movement to end gender-based violence, including sexual assault, and to create a society in which all genders and sexual identities are protected from violence. This commitment to feminist notions of critique (and justice) has made scholarship on domestic violence one of the ideological battlegrounds for patriarchal and anti-feminist debates and initiatives. A political and ideological tension permeates academic fields of study as well as the anti-DV movement and the organizations and networks involved in the movement. One case in point is the ongoing debate about the Violence Against Women Act (first passed in 1994), which was preceded by heated debates that are renewed every time VAWA needs to be reauthorized by Congress.³

In addition, there is also the diversity of ideas and approaches within feminist theory as well as within the feminist movement to consider. This diversity is usually collapsed into sameness by its detractors but is significant for a more nuanced discussion, especially of intersectional feminist approaches.⁴ It is perhaps confusing to also conclude that domestic violence is no longer a feminist issue only. As I will develop further, the project of creating and maintaining families free of intimate partner abuse can also be a patriarchal project and does not necessarily have to be linked to notions of gender-based violence, gender-based oppression, or gender-based discrimination.

A Note on Statistics

My survey reading of scholarship on domestic violence for this project has made me acutely aware of the prevalence of quantitative research in the field. It is indeed powerful to be able to say that one in three women has been a victim of physical abuse by an intimate partner in her lifetime. Fact sheets, produced by organizations like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), a nonprofit organization that raises public awareness and works in public policy, attempt to generate a reaction when they list statistical evidence for the prevalence of DV and the devastation that it causes.⁵ It is clear that statistical evidence can have a powerful impact in convincing scholars, activists, and especially lawmakers of the magnitude of the problem of domestic violence. This power of numbers has been recognized by organizations and advocates who utilize such statistics frequently in their public awareness work and to influence policy changes and decisions.

This focus on quantitative data, however, should not overshadow the fact that every single woman who is assaulted and abused is one woman too many. In addition, the statistical approach focuses on the victims rather than on the perpetrators: If one in three women experiences domestic violence, then how many men in our society are current or former perpetrators? How do statistics define and limit people to their status as victims of DV, and how do they obscure the complicated forms, stories, and trajectories of domestic abuse at its intersection with sexual assault and harassment as well as racist hate crimes and discrimination? Most importantly, though, how do we contend with the fact that the available data are always only a fraction of the actual incidents because there are many structural obstacles to reporting and thus documenting abuse?

Understanding Domestic Violence

After years of reading about and researching domestic violence I began to take for granted that everyone is familiar with the basic knowledge and frameworks employed to understand and address the issue. In conversations and presentations, however, it became clear that perpetual DV awareness campaigns, such as Domestic Violence Awareness Month every October, are necessary because specific communities and the general public lack awareness of the prevalence and dynamics of domestic abuse. In the appendix, I lay out some of the basic definitions and models that guide the work of advocates and service providers in the mainstream DV movement. This framing, especially the Power and Control Wheel, is important because of the way in which several chapters in this book discuss how Muslim anti-DV advocates position themselves vis-à-vis basic models for the causes and dynamics of domestic abuse and how they navigate the underlying assumptions and divergences between the mainstream and Muslim approaches.

Both the vast literature on domestic violence and the basic notions, definitions, and models undergirding advocacy and service work against domestic violence provided the foundation for my research in Muslim communities. However, I wanted to be careful to do more than analyze how Muslim efforts against domestic violence differ from those in the mainstream, thereby making the mainstream models normative and measuring Muslim efforts as divergent and/or derivative. Instead, I explore in this book how Muslim DV advocates themselves approach definitions of DV and models for understanding abusive family dynamics, thereby putting mainstream and Muslim models into conversation. I do not underestimate the power dynamic in that negotiation but instead recognize explicitly, here and elsewhere in the book, that at the intersection between Muslim community boundaries and mainstream funders as well as services, the mainstream has a powerful normative pull.

Ethics, Justice, and Patriarchy

In the very last paragraph above, it happened again: I described and then crossed the boundary between the inside and the outside: an invisible line that seems to separate Muslim communities, Muslim organizations, and Muslim advocates from the non-Muslim society surrounding them. This notion of boundaries is treacherous for it can mean that Muslims are not part of the American society they live among. That is not at all the impression I intend to give, and it does not hold as an empirical reality. Rather, Muslim work against domestic violence is embedded, indeed enmeshed, in larger societal structures and in mainstream DV work as well. There is, however, a dimension to Muslim anti-DV efforts that sets Muslims apart. I have already identified as my most important criterion for identifying research partners that I was interested specifically in explicitly Muslim efforts against DV. It is here that Islam as a religious tradition and as a framework reenters my considerations.

As I write this chapter at the very end of the book-writing process, I want to first present the central arguments in this book. I developed them through the research process, and the reader will have to go through the book to find support for them. They contribute to our understanding of the relationship between religious discourse and ethical practice; they establish a method for evaluating religious ethics in discourse and practice through a framework that foregrounds gender justice and employs Muslim feminist methodologies; and they develop the theoretical notion of protective patriarchy as it emerges in the context of Muslim efforts against domestic abuse.

An Ethic of Non-Abuse

In my years of working with Muslim advocates I often asked why they engage in this work. The same way they wanted to know what compelled me to write this book, I was interested in their motivations for dedicating much of their energy, passion, and time to this difficult work. I had approached the project with the assumption that Muslim advocates would point me to scriptural and exegetical resources in order to explain how Islam/the Qur’an is opposed to domestic abuse. And they often did point me to such resources, but the process whereby they constructed them as authoritative tools in their fight against DV seemed to never have started in the places where the texts dwell. Instead, they spoke of witnessing and/or experiencing abuse and instinctually recoiling from it as something deeply unethical and morally wrong. In other words, their own experiences and their affective responses to them lead to their activism. I eventually concluded that the activists possessed what I have come to call an ethic of non-abuse, which preceded their search for scriptural and thus divine support for their cause.

This ethic of non-abuse prioritizes change through praxis over change through discursive engagement. It is an ethic that is non-negotiable as a foundation, even though their notions of what constitutes non-abuse, which is more than the absence of violence, are more multivalent and complex.

My formulation of this ethic of non-abuse also comes from a longer trajectory in my own research practice. In much of my work on contemporary Muslim debates (and practices) regarding gender roles and gender justice, the greatest challenge has been to avoid the creation of a dichotomy between ideas of a classical Islamic tradition and its contemporary iterations. Similarly, there is an inherent tension in academic literature on American Muslims that tends to measure American Islam (if there is such a thing) against an assumed authentic Islam, typically in Muslim-majority societies. In both cases, what is practiced and discursively formulated in any given temporal or geographical context is measured against a preexisting model Islam. It is also almost always found to be lacking in such comparisons.

This is especially true for projects that are characterized as reform oriented, which implies a movement for change. Such projects of change are predicated on a critique of the existing situation and explanations for the direction of desired change. The broadest and most powerful frame for considering such movements has been the debate about Islam and modernity. It looms large in studies of Muslim reform movements and is deeply influenced by Eurocentric (and colonial) models of development and progress.

Simultaneously, the reference to a preexisting Islam, while itself a product of the nineteenth century,⁶ has been used extensively as a tool in internal Muslim critique and rejection of reform projects as inauthentic, pro-colonial, and at times anti-Islam. This is especially evident in Muslim debates about gender equality and more specifically in feminist projects. Such projects, until now, have been analyzed in terms of their formulation of religious discourses that then were applied to specific contexts, in a linear flow from theory to practice, from discursive production to its application. And while practice and application have been recognized to have an impact on discursive formations, they have rarely been recognized as constitutive elements in a cycle where practice impacts discourse, which impacts practice.

In this book, I trace the practice of an ethic of non-abuse as the first entry point into this cycle, which then gets discursively supported in various ways. In other words, the religious framework, formulated through